January 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Going Through Blanche DuBois’s Luggage By Susan Harlan Still from A Streetcar Named Desire. There is no piece of luggage quite like Blanche DuBois’s trunk in A Streetcar Named Desire. This object contains the life, or the life traces, of one of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring characters. Actors love Blanche for the same reason that they love Hamlet: she is an actor, and she understands what actors understand—that artifice is not the opposite of truth but a means of achieving it. And if she is the ultimate actor, she possesses the ultimate stage prop: her trunk. This object is baggage, furniture, and character all at once, a heavy and unwieldy onstage presence that mirrors Blanche’s own frail but nonetheless steely physicality. In the opening scene of Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation—he had also directed the Broadway production of the play with Jessica Tandy as Blanche, which opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 1947—Vivien Leigh’s Blanche emerges from the steam in the railway station carrying only a small purse and a large, round box (possibly a hatbox). She walks forward tentatively, as if afraid of something unseen. The soldier who helps her onto the streetcar passes the box up to her, and she clutches it as she walks through the streets of New Orleans, dodging people and noises. Blanche doesn’t travel with her trunk; it follows her. She travels light, and indeed, she is light—Mitch (Karl Malden) will refer to her as “light as a feather,” an observation that links her with the fluffy sartorial contents of her trunk. She boasts to Stella (Kim Hunter) that she hasn’t put on weight in ten years, but, as she will remind her sister later, she still feels a sense of heaviness: she carries the burden of the family’s plantation, Belle Reve. For Blanche, Belle Reve is a beautiful white Southern dream of an ancestral estate that has been reduced to ruin, lost. Read More
January 29, 2018 Arts & Culture “We All Have a Fatal Flaw” and Other Aphorisms By Muriel Spark The aphorisms below are plucked from Muriel Spark’s fiction. In the words of Penelope Jardine, editor of The Good Comb: The Sayings of Muriel Spark, “That doesn’t mean either that Dame Muriel did not actually think what she says here and perhaps means it very much.” A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn’t got a chance. I think waiter is such a funny word. It is we who wait. How can she truly love? She’s too timid to hate well, let alone love. It takes courage to practice love. Literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls. How seldom one falls in love with the lovable … how seldom … hardly ever. How do you know when you’re in love? The traffic in the city improves, and the cost of living seems to be very low. Read More
January 29, 2018 Arts & Culture Serial Killers, Versace, and Me By Sarah Weinman Edgar Ramírez as Gianni Versace in American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. In the summer of 1997, a little more than half a lifetime ago, I got my first proper summer job. The job, with one of the many branches of Canada’s federal government in Ottawa, covered the entire tuition for my sophomore year of college (such things were possible in the late nineties). The gig itself was worlds away from my current occupation as a crime writer. “Inventory asset management” was the vague, jargony title that described the mix of my duties: lifting heavy objects—furniture, office supplies—and computer data entry. It was meant to be tedious, a spirit confirmed by the office’s gray cubicles, the recycled air, and the lack of ambition among my colleagues. But my mornings were not boring. I began my summer gig the first week of July, and within a week I had developed a lively routine. One of my coworkers—perhaps even my then boss—left a stack of printouts at my desk. They weren’t for my job. They were something else entirely. “Hey, Sarah!” he’d say. “Here’s the latest on that spree killer you’re obsessed with.” And every morning, I’d sift through the papers, then search on AltaVista or Lycos for the latest on a twenty-seven-year-old fugitive named Andrew Cunanan. I needed to know more. I needed to know why. Two decades later, I suppose I still do. Read More
January 29, 2018 In Memoriam Nicanor Parra, the Alpha-Male Poet By David Unger Nicanor Parra died last week at the age of a hundred three. Here, David Unger remembers a collaboration with Parra that seemed doomed from the start. Nicanor Parra. Photo: Fundación Iberoamericana I first began translating the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra in 1973, on the recommendation of Frank MacShane, the professor of my graduate translation course at Columbia University. I bought Obra gruesa, an anthology of Parra’s poetry published by Chile’s Editorial Universitaria at the Las Americas bookstore in Union Square. Back then, there were four Spanish-language bookstores on or around Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Later, I picked up Poems and Anti-Poems and Emergency Poems, two New Directions collections of Parra’s work. At the time, I was a serious silk-scarf/whiskey-breath poet, best buddies with classmate Frank Lima, a Rimbaud-like, jail-schooled poet. I devoured these three Parra books, then went about looking for poems that had not been translated into English. I found “Último brindis,” a cynical mathematical poem that exemplified Parra’s antipoetry philosophy, and translated it as “The Final Toast.” Read More
January 26, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Sinners, Slavery, and Shults By The Paris Review Adrienne Kennedy and her son in 1970. Photo: Jack Robinson On Sunday, I’ll be in the audience of Adrienne Kennedy’s latest play, He Brought Her Home in a Box. To prepare for it, I thought I’d revisit a few of the playwright’s earlier works, such as Funnyhouse of a Negro, The Owl Answers, and A Lesson in Dead Language. These one-act plays, along with Kennedy’s interwoven commentary, are bound together, among others, in The Adrienne Kennedy Reader. The compendium offers a glimpse into the mind of a remarkable dramatist. Surreal, lyrical, and fragmentary, her plays are beautifully merciless in the ways they explore racism, colonialism, womanhood, and the violence inherent in each. In them, time is nonlinear, and characters shift between a multitude of selves. (Take The Owl Answers, for instance, in which there is “she who is Clara Passmore who is the Virgin Mary who is the bastard who is the owl.”) To parse Kennedy’s exquisite experimentalism demands readers give themselves over entirely to the experience of her plays, perhaps reading them again and again. As she tells us in the book’s preface, “The days when I am writing are days of images fiercely pounding in my head.” And that’s precisely what these are: images of torment, in sequence, that will leave you feeling as though you’ve just woken from a nightmare. I’m eager to see what she’s dreamt up this time. —Caitlin Youngquist What makes the loss of Ursula K. Le Guin so much harder to bear is that she was writing only recently. In 2010, she started a blog, and last year, some of those nonfiction posts were collected as No Time to Spare. My husband and my mother both read it and loved it, and on Tuesday, all excuses dissolved in grief, I opened the book and went straight to the cat chapters. A cat is a question that does not require an answer, so Le Guin, who spent her writing life investigating questions that needed addressing, here writes only of appreciation and affection. Is it any surprise Le Guin was a cat person? “If I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog,” she quips. Pard is her feline subject, a lively, mousing tuxedo, and she observes his cat behavior plainly and openly with love: “If I dribble him water in the washbasin he closes the stopper, thus creating a water hole where savage panthers may crouch in wait for dik-diks and gazelles, or possibly beetles. Then we go downstairs—one flying, the other not.” The last cat chapter ends with a devotional doggerel and a small, mischievous feline portrait. “His breed is Alley, his name is Pard,” she writes. “Life without him would be hard.” —Nicole Rudick Read More
January 26, 2018 Arts & Culture The Ghost of Zora Neale Hurston By Chantel Tattoli © Jennifer May Reiland “Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen years dead, was a mudslinging protofeminist novelist-folklorist-playwright-ethnographer, not to be crossed, and she had climbed to minor literary stardom in the thirties with her accounts of the Southern African American experience, specifically black Southern womanhood. She was, in the words of her friend Langston Hughes, “the most amusing” among New York’s “Niggerati.” She hailed herself as their queen. But Hurston was complicated. “Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves,” she once wrote. “It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.” She declined to recall a single memory of racial prejudice in her autobiography. Her sycophantic attitude toward her white patrons, Red-baiting, and eventual criticism of Brown v. Board of Education had rotted her name. “She was quite capable of saying, writing, or doing things different from what one might have wished,” Walker admitted. But she forgave Hurston. As Hurston herself declared, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?” And so: nearly a decade before Walker published The Color Purple, a sister masterpiece to Their Eyes Were Watching God, the contributing editor at Ms. magazine stood in weeds up to her waist in Florida while sand and bugs poured into her shoes, looking for Hurston. Walker had flown from Jackson, Mississippi, to Orlando and driven to nearby Eatonville, the prideful all-black town where Hurston was raised, but not, as Walker learned from an octogenarian former classmate—Mathilda Moseley, teller of “woman-is-smarter-than-man” tales in Hurston’s Mules and Men—where she was put under. Walker’s quest took her to Fort Pierce, on the Atlantic Coast, to the dead end of Seventeenth Street, to the Garden of Heavenly Rest. Read More